On Friday night, Ken and I planned to do a light dinner to prepare for my juice cleanse on Saturday, but we got sidetracked and ended up having a large meal at Bar Jamon. When we first met, we originally wanted to grab dinner at Bar Jamon but it was so packed that we ended up getting drinks at a nearby bar. We finally made it back around 11pm on Friday night.

The bar is behind Casa Mono, the Michelin-starred Mario Batali tapas restaurant. I’m not a huge fan of Casa Mono because their service and food is spotty, so I was a bit nervous about dining at Bar Jamon. The bartenders were very friendly and our server was a little on the quiet side and didn’t help us with our wine choice, but gave us really great recommendations for tapas.

We started with duck liver pate and apricots:

So decadent and the apricots had chopped almonds (or some kind of nut) mixed in – I am a huge fan of foie gras, pate, and any kind of liver and this definitely had the right notes of sweet and salty. Ken liked it, too!

The server recommended this dish and I had no idea what it was until I took a bite – octopus with spicy tomato sauce and chickpeas:

The octopus was my favorite dish of the night – perfectly cooked and it had a great spicy tomato flavor with the chickpeas.

Beet and goat cheese salad:

A pretty standard beet and goat cheese salad – I haven’t eaten beets in a long time but these were really great with Bar Jamon’s acidic dressing.

Another favorite from the meal – bread con tomate:

I was introduced to this simple dish in Barcelona (at their markets) and it’s a simple dish but so unassumingly delicious. Bar Jamon rubs tomatoes and garlic on crusty French bread and toasts it – simple flavors but so comforting and tasty.

Ken did the second round of ordering (so there’s a lot more meat!) – we started off with roasted red peppers and some kind of salumi:

The roasted red peppers were deliciously sweet but the meat was a little too chewy.

Goat cheese with pepitas:

Surprisingly, the goat cheese was more mild than the goat cheese from the beet salad (probably because the salad had the acidic vinaigrette). Ken originally wanted the dish but ended up not wanting it after all.

My least favorite dish of the evening involved lentils, peppers, and another type of charcuterie:

The lentils were a little too undercooked, the peppers didn’t have a great taste with the charcuterie, and overall, I didn’t like the dish.

After finishing an entire bottle of wine and our dinner, we were pretty stuffed but Ken wanted to try the churros so we ordered the churros con chocolate:

I haven’t eaten that many churros in my life (in fact, I think I’ve only had churros two times before visiting Bar Jamon) but I know that churros should not be rock solid. We dipped the churros in the chocolate for a couple of minutes hoping the chocolate sauce would soften the churros a bit, but it DIDN’T HELP! We might have had a stale order of churros because it was the end of the night, but seriously, these were the worst churros I have ever eaten.

We enjoyed our dinner at Bar Jamon and had a wonderful stroll around Gramercy Park (it smelled like the suburbs because they were watering the grass as we walked by). Definitely adding Bar Jamon to my list of go-to restaurants in the city (but never ordering the churros again!)